Widely-used social media site Facebook has been accused of bias concerning which news stories the site prioritizes.
Charisma News cites a 2014 Pew Research Center poll that revealed 61
percent of millennials, 51 percent of Generation X-ers, and 39 Percent
of Baby Boomers “got news about politics and government in the previous
week” from Facebook.
Facebook also tailors news stories to each user, based on location, pages that user has liked, and things the user has posted.
With so many people using Facebook as a main news source, allegations of news bias is troubling.
“Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to
conservative readers from the social network's influential "trending"
news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the
project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the
right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other
conservative topics from appearing in the highly influential section,
even though they were organically trending among the site's users,” reported the website Gizmodo.
Facebook employees denied these allegation, stating that they “take
allegations of bias very seriously” and that Facebook is “a platform for
people and perspectives from across the political spectrum.”
Charisma News cites instances
of the liberal left tweaking news stories to be more favorable to their
point of view. The insinuation is that, if the left bends the facts or
censors conservative views in other news spaces, they may be doing so on
Facebook as well.
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